Mile High

by Richard Condon

  Fearing Wood’s crimps—because he truly admired Fernando Wood—Paddy moved out of his waterfront boardinghouse and walked north almost three miles every night to a farmhouse where he could lock himself in. He avoided the Irish shantytown along the old Bloomingdale Road just farther north because the crimps were drawn to it like flies to a jam pot. At the fish market, if any jolly smiler spoke to him and invited him off for a drink Paddy would ignore the man. Because of the crimps, he refused to drink for the rest of his life, from the day he set foot in America. If the same jolly stranger spoke to him twice Paddy would stop what he was doing and stare the man down. If it happened a third time he would hit the man with a short piece of lead pipe he kept in his trousers, because crimps are brutal men, then sell the man to Ma Steinet, getting five dollars. After three of Wood’s men went down under Paddy’s pipe and disappeared he thought they had crossed him off as a seafaring prospect, but his employer told him that he had been called uptown and told to fire Paddy or lose his license. That was that. Mr. Wood was very offended. When the Hilda M. Hess, the Antarctic whaler that was lying out in the upper bay, was loaded and ready to leave port, Mr. Wood had said that Paddy would be on it.

  “What’ll I do?” Paddy asked.

  “Get inland. Go to Pennsylvania.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m goin’ inta politics here.”

  “Over Mr. Wood’s cold body, you are.”

  “I’m young. I’ll wait. I ain’t goin’ ta wait until I go vomitin’ around the world in a whaling ship.”

  Paddy never returned to the farmhouse. He knew Wood’s crimps would be waiting for him along that dark road. He went straight to Ma Steinet, an evil-smelling old woman but Wood’s competitor.

  “Wood’s crimps are after me.”

  “You’re not the first.”

  “He got me outta me job.”

  “Go find a priest. Why tell me?”

  “I want a job. But not on no ship.”

  She stared at him unpleasantly.

  “I use me eyes,” Paddy said, earnest and unsmiling. “I’m a good crimp. Put me on as a runner.” The runners were rowed out to meet the incoming ships, as far out in the harbor as they could get to, to board them with grapnels, then go into the foc’sles with booze and even go aloft with the crew to help them stow the muslin. They’d tell the sailors anything to get them to jump the ship when it docked, then to move them, drunk and helpless, into the boss crimp’s boardinghouse.

  “You’d fall outta the rowboat,” Ma said, but she admired the way he never smiled but just jutted his fat lips outward and stared through her with hard eyes to some distant objective. She could feel the coldness of him, strong enough to put out a fire. “All right. You can be the drayman,” she told him. Drayman was low man in the crimping trade. When the runners got the seamen ashore the draymen moved their gear to the boarding-house, then after Ma had signed them on an outgoing ticket, the drayman carted the doped, drunk and sometimes dead bodies back to the wharves, now stripped of their money and their gear.

  Paddy took the job. He got a dose of pox his second night in one of Ma’s boardinghouses and never touched a street whore again for the rest of his life. Ma paid him room and board and three dollars a week and Fernando Wood forgot about him. Good luck continued. Young Bill Tweed, leader of the Cherry Hill gang, had founded the Americus Vespucci Volunteer Fire Company. Because of Paddy’s strength he won himself the right to wear one of Bill Tweed’s red shirts and became a star member of the Americus Engine Company Number Six, known all over the city as the Big Six, champions for outracing and outmaneuvering any volunteer fire company in Manhattan; fighting it out with fists at the water hydrant if the race was close. It was thrilling to see them race against the Eight Company down Broadway, the great red-shirted men teamed like horses to drag the engine—its box brightly emblazoned with the head of a snarling Bengal tiger—with Big Bill Tweed jogging beside them and blowing his silver trumpet, while fire buffs and children tumbled and ran all around them. Their fame spread far beyond the city. When Millard Fillmore became president they were presented to him at the White House. The Number Six Company did a lot for Paddy West.

  Paddy didn’t drink or whore and now he gave up smoking because it cut his wind. He was the industry’s model crimp. He could bring in more sailors with a stern stare than another crimp could with a bottle of booze. If any woman in any of the three saloons the Casker owned ever spoke to him, Paddy would knock her down. Soon all the top whores on the waterfront came to show him doglike devotion. He organized the best of them in his own little band and took over the organization of their sales and promotion. But he spoke to them only through his helper, Jiggs Tobin, a Roscommon man who was saving to buy his own horse and hack.

  Working for Ma, running the girls and cashing bets on the Big Six weren’t the only sources of income for young Paddy. He taught himself to be an accomplished pickpocket, no mean feat for a farm boy with hands like a cow’s udders. Ma Steinet would watch him watching the runners roll the drunk sailors and then get drunk themselves. She’d admire the way Paddy would walk among them, lifting the money out of their pockets. In that way he was an honest thief. He never stole from strangers or the sober. She was pleased with his steady ambition and the no-nonsense, teetotal way about him. She jumped him over the ranks of runners into the first vacancy as boardinghouse master when he was only twenty-two years old—six feet, two inches tall, one hundred and ninety pounds, without a smile or a frown, but never stupid-looking for any of that.

  Until a crew was ordered by a shipping company, the Casker’s boarders were housed warmly and fed well for two dollars a week from each man. She ran saloons in each doss and specialized in seafaring men. Whatever it was she offered, it was so right for sailors that even though men knew they had been shanghaied before from one of Casker Steinet’s places, most of them returned again and again.

  The boardinghouse Paddy ran was close to the river and had a trapdoor for lowering the drugged men into small boats to be run out to the big ships that waited impatiently for their crews in the harbor. For supplying crews Ma got the advance notes issued by the shipping companies against two or three months’ pay for each man she dropped aboard. The runners got five dollars a head per man, the boardinghouse master got 10 percent of Ma’s estimated gross, which was about 2 percent of true earnings, but Ma never objected to Paddy running the whores or picking the runners’ pockets.

  Any boy’s ambition modifies as he grows older. The year Paddy landed was the year of the appointment of the first American representative to the Vatican, and he dreamed of parading past the Swiss Guards in silk knickerbockers. However, by 1856, after fighting in the forces of Mayor Fernando Wood, Paddy had worked himself along in the party councils at least far enough so that he made seventeen hundred dollars out of securing, but not serving, writs of condemnation of the new Elevated Railway Company, and six hundred and fifteen dollars as the professional friend of the workers in the shoe industry. He was among the first one hundred members of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, formed to protect the seniority rights of shoemakers against cheap competition from beginners. Paddy opened his first saloon in the sixties (which, in 1878, became the first saloon in the nation to install electric light). When George Leslie robbed the Manhattan Savings Bank of $3,000,000 in broad daylight, although two of Leslie’s men went to jail for it, Paddy West saw to it that Leslie was not brought to trial, because of “lack of evidence.” Paddy was becoming one of the men to see in New York government.

  But when Ma Steinet died in 1860 Paddy was just getting started. He was twenty-eight years old. He was managing all three of the Steinet boardinghouses, all fourteen runners, three draymen, five boatmen, seven slop shops that sold the seamen the gear that the boardinghouse master stole from them before they were drugged and shipped out. He was shipping master, i.e., employment agent-crimp, for twenty-six shipping companies. Ma went feeble three years before the
end. She was bedridden. She told Paddy she loved him like a son, then spat on the floor beside the bed and smiled at him as coyly as a young lover. She knew to a dime how much her business brought in. She told him that if he would keep his stealing down to not more than 20 percent, she would leave him the whole business and the “goodwill.” He was stealing 55 percent. He asked her if she’d put the intention in writing. She declined. She maintained sensitively that signing a paper such as that could only help her to die more quickly, and again she was pleased with him because he didn’t bother to express horror at such a thought.

  “If you don’t trust me, who can you trust?”

  “Me brass knucks,” Ma said wanly.

  “Would you trust a judge?”

  “Are you daft?”

  “Supposin’ I can figure out a way that will keep you safe?”

  “How?”

  “Supposin’ the biggest bank in the city was in charge of the paper, and this bank had to be satisfied you died a natural death—?”

  “A bank is only men, Paddy.”

  “But there has to be a way!” His voice went harsh. It frightened her. Her breathing became disordered again, because one of her troubles was that she took in more air than she gave out—the cardinal rule with everything else in her life. “I got a sister in Perth Amboy,” she wheezed. “She has two sons. One is a doctor and I wish—I wish—”

  “Whaddaye wish, Ma?”

  “Never mind. Maybe I wish I had two sons in Perth Amboy.”

  That amused Paddy but not to the point of smiling. He laughed. It was a quick single sound as though a hand had been caught in a slammed cash drawer. “If you had two sons,” he said, “they’da been shanghaied twice by now.”

  She cackled gratefully over the compliment, then worked on trying to breathe again. “If I signed it, it would have to say that I leave three thousand dollars to each boy and four thousand to my sister plus my jewelry.” She nearly winced at the look in his eyes.

  “What jewelry?” he asked.

  “Where you can’t find it.”

  “All right. You accept the two boys.”

  “I accept the two boys with the biggest bank. And I write the paper. No lawyers. And the paper has to say that you have to work for me until I die no matter how long it takes and that I have to die natural or you get nothing.”

  Paddy stood up. His menacing bedside manner was gone. “I’ll get the pen and paper. You decide which bank. Then I’ll be off to Perth Amboy. And I want to say this. I appreciate it. I won’t take you for no twenty percent. Five percent, no more, and that’s settled.”

  She managed a two-tone sigh. “Just don’t steal more than twenty percent, Paddy, and I got a good deal.”

  After Ma died Paddy set his course for politics as though he were pulling Engine Number Six. He leased the three boardinghouses to Charley Gleason. He sold the slop shops to Larry Meagher, and over the twenty-two years with Ma and his bands of fancy girls and his various overrides he had saved forty-one thousand dollars and he now owned leases and buildings and land. When he burned the boardinghouses that stood between Fulton and Wall Streets after the leases expired, he collected another three thousand in insurance. He built tenements on the land with a good bank loan that the Party arranged for him at fair rates.

  Paddy’s first leader at Tammany Hall was Fernando Wood. Then he prospered under his old fire captain, Bill Tweed, then moved along to Honest John Kelly, Squire Croker and Mr. Murphy. They had all been great men, each in a different way, none as great as the greatest, Aaron Burr. He served them all with pride and pleasure, staying well back, out of sight as much as possible. He opened the first of his string of saloons in Franklin Street, just across Center Street from the Tombs prison and the Criminal Courts Building, which Bill Tweed had built for the city at a cost exceeding the original estimate of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars by twelve million, two hundred and fifty thousand. Bill Tweed knew, and proved it to Paddy West with a finger pointing to the careers of Commodore Vanderbilt, Mr. Astor and Jay Gould, that this was the American way, and a man was nothing without his money.

  Paddy knew that money was respectability, politics was power, and power was money. His visible movements held no more expression than his face as he went on his way to acquire all these. He taught the art of silence and invisibility to his son years later. “Let them others have all the fame and take all the risks,” he counseled daily. He would have little Eddie write lists of sentences like that fifty times every evening. He offered the boy a bonus of two dollars a month when Eddie was nine years old if he could remain silent and unsmiling and speak only to answer questions, and the boy collected from his delighted father month after month. Paddy was the hardest kind of hard Irish and he wanted his boy to carry that on. Eddie was raised as another kind of foreigner by his mother, a startlingly, even shockingly, different kind of foreigner. But his father’s way was stronger, and the boy grew up to be a Kerry man surviving in the midst of famine; a hard, alien thinker who was pleased to have all others indulge their emotions.

  Paddy settled the bands of girls into the first of his three brothels, then expanded. The houses were placed in the gay districts, each in a building with one of his saloons. After he got the saloons going, Big Tim Sullivan gave him “the license” to open his first gambling setup. It prospered from the start. However, the hub of hubs, the diadem center of all of his life’s work, was the Franklin Street saloon, which became one of the most famous saloons in the city from the day it opened in 1871. By 1880 it was the gathering place for all the big politicians and gangsters; prizefighters, judges and jockeys; prosecutors and defense lawyers; pimps, con men, bail bondsmen and leading actors. Paddy presided over all of it, approachable but unsmiling, thick-lipped and thick-limbed, the guardian of Tammany’s prestige and power at the doorway to the Tombs.

  It was his cardinal rule that every alternative had to be investigated before he turned anyone down, and the only reason for refusing, in every instance, was disloyalty. Every morning at nine he dressed in a black suit with a black vest and a black tie on a white shirt with a high celluloid collar and climbed into the original old hack owned by Jiggs Tobin (whose loyalty was of the highest) and was driven from his house in Oliver Street to the corner three blocks north of the Franklin Street saloon, where, rain and shine, he would step down daintily from the cab and walk with slow majesty along the street, distributing largesse as he went—twenty dollars’ worth of nickels, dimes and quarters.

  He entered his saloon, walked up one flight of stairs to the small, nearly bare, office with its picture of Aaron Burr, the current Tammany leader and the incumbent cardinal. He ran everything from there even though, as district leader, his political headquarters was on Madison Street. One day a week he ate lunch in Mulberry Street, always the same: that raw ham, spaghetti with the meat and tomato gravy, no wine, one coffee. One other day each week he ate lunch in Rivington Street, always the same: some of that cold fish, boiled beef, some boiled carrots, a little more boiled beef and one coffee. He wanted the voters and the gangs to see him, to see that he wasn’t one of those who favored the Irish. During peak business hours he presided over the barroom, always available. Throughout the winter he attended the important fires in his district and saw that the burned-out were housed by his block captains and clothed and fed. He handled the drunks and the dispossess cases personally in the courts and attended weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.

  He was a flannel-mouthed, burly fairy godfather to all who were loyal. He got the boys out of jail. He saved them from hanging—until January 1, 1889, when he began to save them from the electric chair. He never refused a touch. He never forgot to collect interest on the touch. He was for the city. He helped get the subway built after having gotten the contractors’ applications turned down. He did as much for builders, lawyers, cops, judges, businessmen and bankers as he ever did for the criminal element. He was a community leader in the greatest democracy, all of it exquisitely organized pr
ecisely along the lines of the church itself by Honest John Kelly, one of the best of them. The individual’s vote was captured by the tenement captain, who reported it to the block captain. All the block captains were members of the election district committee and accountable to an election district captain. In the church chain this was much like an altar boy helping the parish priest, who reported to the bishop (the election district captain), who reported to Paddy West, district leader, the equivalent of a cardinal. He reported to the executive committee of Tammany Hall, the city’s Curia, together with thirty-three other district leaders, and directly to the Leader of Tammany himself, their pope. All of them along the chain handed out bail money, Christmas turkeys, coal, jobs, justice, and clothes in return for votes and loyalty.

  The birthday of Columbus had been a Tammany holiday celebrated long before Tammany encouraged that it be taken over by Italo-Americans. Paddy always made it his policy to celebrate this day exclusively with Italian voters. On October 12, 1887, as Patron and Grand Marshal of the annual Columbus Day ball, when he was fifty-five years old, Paddy West, a bachelor, first rested his eyes on Maria Corrente.

  He was seated with friends, runners and lobbygows along the wall of the ballroom when she danced past him, fluidly correct in the arms of her father, Giuseppe Corrente, a leading importer of olive oil and cheeses. The room had been splashed with bunting in the colors of the Italian and American flags. Planks on sawhorses, covered with pastel crepe paper, bore up under pyramids of ham and cheese sandwiches, piles of glistening sugar cakes. Among these stacks waiters worked to fill pitchers and glasses with new red wine. The music was loud and happy. The children ran at top speed in and out among the dancers.